Édouard Glissant, Martiniquan poet, novelist, essayist, and thinker, one of the Caribbean’s towering literary figures, died this morning in Paris, at the age of 82.

Described by Le Monde as “the champion of métissage and exchange” — “le chantre du métissage et de l’échange” — Glissant was a major proponent of the Antillanité movement, articulating a unique Caribbean identity created in the collisions of cultural elements from many continents in the matrix of the Antilles. He wrote: “La Caraïbe est une réalité culturelle . . . toujours ouverte sur les autres cultures” — “The Caribbean is a cultural reality . . . always open to other cultures.”

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From the hill direction a whole expanse suddenly shoves its cart into dizzying splendour
In the factories’ mill my poverty smiles over powers of the earth
In the cane scars in shins forever black
The water so often called for reddens to my caressing voice
Rebel now from irascible depths of embrace my leap into the standstill.

Like the hougans leafed out in patience
ah the sole evidence I desire is the last voyage of my lassitude among the dry leaves of a monsoon
the flowering of islands the frothy geography of islands on eviscerated seas
our hymns our brows barred from sources our feet crammed with storms . . .

— Édouard Glissant, from “Wild Reading”, trans. Betsy Wing

Detail of Tropical Night (2006–present), by Christopher Cozier (version installed for Afro Modern, Tate Liverpool, 29 January–25 April, 2010). Image courtesy the artist

Vous Êtes Ici (You Are Here), an exhibition of work by thirteen Caribbean artists, curated by Dominique Brebion, opens today at Fondation Clément in Martinique.

Brebion quotes Édouard Glissant —

The Creole language says ici-là (“here-there”) doubtless to extend the forces of “here” towards the infinite. It often instists on ici-là minm (“right here there”), nowhere else but here, which is nevertheless over there or up there (whence the Creole language gets là minm, “right there” meaning “right now, immediately”), as if to make a clean break between “here” and its near or far surroundings

— and asks, “How do the artists of the Caribbean perceive this ‘nowhere else’ which is theirs, but which remains an exotic and faraway ‘over there’ whose location is vague to all but the natives?”

Vous Êtes Ici includes work by Thierry Alet, Alex Burke, Christopher Cozier, Annalee Davis, Polibio Díaz, Tirzo Martha, Trevor Mathison and Gary Stewart, Tony Monsanto, Ebony G. Patterson, Ingrid Pollard, Marcos Lora Read, and Oneika Russell.

Jenny Alpha, Martiniquan singer and “grande dame de la culture créole,” died on Wednesday 8 September in Paris.

The RFI website posted a short obituary:

A familiar figure in French jazz clubs, Alpha crossed paths with actress Josephine Baker and musician Duke Ellington. After the Second World War, she campaigned for recognition of Creole culture, at a time when the poets and activists Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor were fighting for the promotion of black conciousness.

Originally from the French overseas territory of Martinique, Alpha moved to Paris in 1929 to become a teacher. She soon started singing bossa nova in French cabarets and music halls.

In a tribute to Alpha, French Minister of Culture Frédéric Mitterrand said that “as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sedar Senghor had become advocates of negritude, she devoted all her energy and talent to the defense and recognition of Creole culture.”

She continued to perform well into her hundredth decade, appearing on stage in a production of The Cherry Orchard when she was ninety-four, and releasing her most recent album, La sérénade du muguet, at ninety-eight.

This five-minute documentary was created earlier this year to mark Alpha’s hundredth birthday: